Samsung has long ruled India’s mid-range smartphone market. Priced under Rs. 30,000, the Samsung Galaxy A7 is one of the company’s most popular offerings. The phone is supposed to include many of the features found in Samsung’s premium flagship. This is the phone you’re supposed to buy if you want a premium Samsung experience without having to shell out a bomb for the Samsung Note 9 or the Samsung Galaxy S9 or S10.
Is the Samsung Galaxy A7 really worth your time and money, though? Or should you be looking at some other phone in the sub-Rs.30,000 segment? We’ll help you figure it out with this review!
What’s new with the Galaxy A7?
The Samsung Galaxy A7 has many cool features you should get excited about:
- The Samsung Galaxy A7 has a 6.0 inch Super AMOLED display with a massive 441ppi density.
- It includes a special three-camera setup at the back, allowing you to click true-to-life pictures.
- The Samsung Galaxy A7 has a powerful Exynos 7885 octa-core CPU, known to be a powerful beast.
Design: Elegant Glass-Sandwich Design
The Samsung Galaxy A7 is a tall, thin, and sleek phone. It has a signature Samsung look, with thin bezels, rounded edges, and a beautiful color scheme. The phone measures an about-average 159.8 x 76.8 x 7.5mm. Weight-wise, it’s lighter than many other smartphones out there. The A7 weighs just 168g, making the phone easy to grip and handle with just one hand. The display is without a notch and looks good. There’s a Micro SD card slot on the left and power button and volume keys are on the right side of the phone.
Previous Samsung A iterations had an all aluminum body. These days, though, most manufacturers have moved on to glass. Samsung has followed suit with the A7. The thin plastic frame is sandwiched between two glass bodies at the front and at the back. The glass looks snazzy, is smooth to the touch, and feels good to hold. Design-wise, the Samsung A is undoubtedly a good looking phone.
Display: Beautiful Super AMOLED Infinity Display
It’s no secret that Samsung makes the best smartphone displays in the market. Usually, though, the company only uses them on its premium flagships. This time, however, Samsung has included its premium display on the Samsung A7. The A7 has a 6-inch screen with an aspect ratio of 18:5:9 and a stunning full HD+ resolution of 1080 x 2220 pixels. The pixel per inch (PPI) count is also very high at 411.
To put it simply, the Samsung A7 renders pictures, videos, and text beautifully. The color accuracy is excellent, as is the white balance. Watching a movie or playing a game on the big, clear screen is a delightful experience. The display also has a very good maximum brightness, making it usable outdoors under direct sunlight. The Galaxy A7 also supports the “Always On” feature, which shows a clock, minimum notifications, and the date even the screen is off. All in all, you can’t get a better display than the one found on the Galaxy A7.
Camera: Crystal-Clear Photos
The most standout feature on the Samsung A7 is the camera. It features an impressive, top-of-the-line triple camera setup at the back. The primary camera is a 24MP wide lens with an f/1.7 aperture. It’s supported by an 8MP ultra-wide lens with an f/2.4 aperture and a 5MP depth sensor with an f/2.2 aperture. The camera offers features like HDR and Panorama. There’s a single camera at the front, a wide 24MP lens with an f/2.0 aperture.
In real-world tests, the camera performs spectacularly well. It’s capable of taking detailed, lifelike pictures in a variety of settings. The three lenses allow you to take some great distant, mid-range, and up-close shots. The setup makes it easy to capture wide-FOV landscape shots. Night-time performance is good too. The A7 supports features like Panorama, Pro, Live Focus, Slow Motion, Hyperlapse, and AR Emoji. The front camera offers useful selfie features like Beautification mode. Expect your face to look sharp and clear in portrait mode.
Performance: Speedy and Intuitive
The Samsung A7 is a fast phone. It packs Samsung’s proprietary Exynos 7885 Octa chipset. The chipset has an octa-core setup, with 2 x 2.2 GHz Cortex A-73 and 6 x 1.6 GHz Cortex A-53 cores. You can opt for 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of storage. The phone has a dedicated microSD card slot with expandable storage support of up to 512GB.
Using the Samsung A7 is a fun experience. The screen is very responsive to the touch. Apps will load very quickly and you can run several apps at once, thanks to the 4/6GB of RAM. Browsing the internet on the phone is smooth. The octa-core processor is good for multitasking. You can use the phone for casual use or for work purposes. The A7 has a good enough processor and graphics chip to run demanding games in medium settings.
Software: Improvement on Stock Android 8.0 Experience
Samsung’s Experience UI has always been a step up over the stock Android experience. It features many exclusive, useful apps and, of course, Samsung’s voice assistant Bixby. The A7 runs Samsung’s latest Experience UI. It includes pre-loaded Samsung apps like Samsung Mail and Amazon Shopping. It has a feature called Game Tools which optimizes the phone for playing games.
Some other notable features offered by the A7 are Dual Messenger and Chat Over Video. With Dual Messenger, you can run two instances of the same app at once. It can come in handy if you have two or more accounts. With Chat Over Video, you can chat on WhatsApp without interrupting your video streaming. Samsung is expected to roll out updates to Android 9.0 Pie for the A7 sometime in the first quarter of 2019.
Battery Life: Goes All Day
The Samsung A7 has a large, power-hungry screen that requires some serious juice. Luckily, the 3300mAh Li-Po battery packed into the A7 is more than up to the task. The battery can go for 10 hours of moderate-to-heavy use on a single charge. In everyday use scenarios, you can use the phone for a whole day between charges. The battery performance is more than satisfactory.
The Samsung A7 supports a micro USB charger. While it doesn’t support fast charging, the included charger can still bring the phone up to 100% pretty quickly. In tests, the A7 can go from 0 to 100% charge in a little under 2 hours, which is very respectable. The phone’s UI has many battery optimization features that preserve the battery-life over extended periods of time.
The Bottom Line
The Samsung A7 has an amazing camera, a beautiful display, a great processor, and plenty of storage space. The battery life is solid, as is the operating system. Taking everything into account, we can say the Samsung A7 is an excellent phone and definitely worth your time.
Don’t know if the Samsung Galaxy A7 is the phone you want? Why not try it before you buy it at Rentomojo? Rentomojo allows you to rent the Galaxy A7 for an affordable monthly price. If you love the phone, you can buy it from us after a 12-month rental for a small payment. If not, we give you the option of upgrading to a new smartphone! Learn more here.